"all the faster" (in Latin too)

[Beverly Flanigan]

I'm an "all the ...er" user and never thought of it as regional (Minnesota
born and bred).  But I agree that Erik's examples are odd, indeed
ungrammatical for me.

At 06:35 PM 6/28/2005, you wrote:
>On Jun 28, 2005, at 11:29 AM, Larry Horn wrote:
>
>>... I think there's also a pragmatic element that can override the
>>lexical semantics.  If I'm lowering some shelf, or whatever, my
>>companion can ask me to lower it a bit more and I could reply (if I'm
>>a speaker of the relevant wider dialect) "That's all the lower it
>>will/can go".  Let me googlify this intuition...yup, here are a few,
>>some including pricing rather than literal height:...
>
>nice observations.
>
>erik thomas's discussion of the grammar of the construction (in
>frazer's "Heartland English") is very short -- only two pages.
>thomas accepts a certain number of examples not in cleftoid contexts,
>though they all strike me as very odd:
>
>18.  An hour's all the longer that show lasts.
>20.  I'm going all the faster I can go.
>21.  I tried all the harder I could.
>22.  He's washing dishes all the more quickly that he wants to.
>
>(22 suffers from the periphrastic comparative as well as the non-
>cleftoid context.)
>
>thomas also accepts this comparative with a "than" clause (and i don't):
>
>16.  That's all the bigger than an apple they get.
>
>thomas notes that superlatives can take simple adverbs as modifiers,
>but this comparative cannot:
>
>14.  That's the very prettiest she can be.
>15. *That's all the very prettier she can be.
>
>[note: the examples are thomas's, not mine.]
>
>(here, this comparative is like comparison with "as": *That's as very
>pretty as she can be.)
>
>and he notes that this comparative can't be used with "much", though
>the superlative and "as" comparison can:
>
>23.  That was   the most /as much as   we could do.
>24. *That was all the more we could do.
>
>something i've just noticed that also differentiates this comparative
>from the superlative and "as" comparison is external modification:
>
>  That was almost   the loudest /as loud as   she could sing.
>*That was almost all the louder she could sing.
>
>but enough of random observations...
>
>arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)